December 23, 2011 · 7:56 am

A sketch on the Gianicolo

(Bit of a different format today. Poem-ish as opposed to prose-rant.)

 

What are the mountains to the east of Rome?
I need a name, for everything.
For all these domes and rusted trees,
relaxing into cold under the autumnal
sun of a Roman December.

Is that the Chiesa Nuova? Or that?
And what is that uccello, bobbing its head
and moving closer in fluttering leaps,
until its tiny mind diverts it from
dubious predator to comforting waste bin.

The Pantheon, of course, ever ironic.
The Synagogue, standing in modest
diagonal polarity to the drums of St Peter’s,
through the trees over my left shoulder,
just beyond Anita.

Brave Anita, whose parenting
falls far short – by modern standards.
Galloping side-saddle, pistol in one hand,
baby – falling, flying, giggling at war,
at the birth of the Republic – in the other.

And a wall, a new wall,
slicing the picturesque, traffic-throbbed
rubble of the Eternal City.
A wall for a nation, 1861 to 2011,
but in those one-hundred and fifty years,
who believed what?

indipendenza
territoriale
politici
politiche
patria

All the marble men, here on the Gianicolo –
what did they believe?
Petko Voyvoda, who shares my reverie.
All the way from Bulgaria,
immortalised here as a sombre
Garibaldino, real man’s moustache,
and flamboyant brocade.

I’ll be leaving, but he’s stuck,
fixed gazing east, at those mountains.
What are they called?
The Sabines? Are they Appenines?
Whatever. They’re splendid today,
beneath the sun,
adorned with snow.

Daniel Etherington, 23 December 2011

 

 

Edit 3 Jan 2012:

Kinda been feeling this needs footnotes.

It’s not really a poem, it’s just a sketch, but with references that won’t make much sense unless you know Rome, and you know the exact same bench on the Gianicolo, or can be bothered to spend some time with Google.

So anyway:
Gianicolo – Italian name for the Janiculum, the hill to the west of the city of Rome. It’s on the west side of the Tiber, and provides a wonderful view. A cannon is fired from here every day at midday.
Chiesa Nuova – “New Church”… built 1575–1599. The address is technically via del Governo Vecchio, but more logically it’s found if you wander along the main drag of corso Vittorio Emanuele II.
Uccello – Italian for bird. I just like the word. And it makes me think of the Renaissance artist Paolo Uccello.
Pantheon – the ancient place of worship in Rome. Now, of course, an Monotheon.
Synagogue – the Great Synagogue of Rome, alongside the Tiber in the Ghetto, built in the 1870s.
St Peters – the great Renaissance Bascilica, built over many decades, and consecrated in 1623. The dome was inspired by the Pantheon, and the Duomo of Florence, and have design input, successively, from the likes of Bramante and Michelangelo.
Anita – Anita Garibaldi, aka Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro di Garibald, 1821-1849, wife of Guiseppe Garibaldi. Her “gaucho” heritage comes through in the statue on the Gianicolo.
“wall for a nation” – there’s a wall commemorating 150 years of the Republic.
Petko Voyvoda – one of the many busts of men who fought for the Republic on the Gianicolo is this Bulgarian chap, 1844-1900.
Garibaldino – a soldier of Garibaldi’s campaign.
Sabines – Sabine Hills in the province of Lazio, around Rome.
Apennines – Apennine Mountains, which run down much of the centre of Italy.

Leave a comment

Filed under Rome

December 13, 2011 · 2:21 am

Katching-22

Living in Italy can be a Kafka-esque experience. It’s not a new observation, indeed it’s something that Tobias Jones alludes to a lot in his highly enjoyable extended op-ed book The Dark Heart of Italy. But we’ve been having such fun (*gritted teeth*), here are a few more first-hand experiences of Italy’s apparent love for the Catch-22 scenario.

My favourite has to be Fran going to collect an ID card at FAO – the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation that her organisation, Bioversity, has a relationship with. (They’re not part of FAO, but FAO can be considered the mothership.) So Fran has to go to the FAO offices, an impressive modernist block near the Circo Massimo that used to be the Department of Italian East Africa.

“Hello, I’m here to collect my ID card,” says Fran. “OK, ID per favore,” replieth the security guard, or words to that effect. See where I’m going with this? It brings to mind the scenes in Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil with Rene from ‘Allo ‘Allo (Gordon Kaye) manning the desk of the Ministry of Information, confounding the enquiries of Jill (Kim Greist).

My least favourite has been going on for the past three months, but nearly caused us both to have nervous breakdowns yesterday through sheer exasperation.

Three months ago we ordered internet for our flat; while we wait, we’re relying on dongles. This isn’t great, as it’s expensive and the data is limited, hence we’ve not been able to enjoy such basics of modern life as BBC 6Music and Skyping family and friends, something we’d really like to be able to do at Christmas, per favore.

A couple of weeks, a guy from Telecom Italia – which still own the infrastructure, despite deregulation – came to check the line. The ironically named Fastweb, which we’d opted to order broadband through, had been suggesting that the hold-up was due to Telecom Italia, so this gave us hope.

After our umpteenth schlep to a Fastweb shop, and our umpteenth instance of the same absurd scenario where we asked for an update, and a sales assistant tapped away at their computer for 10 minutes, then said “OK, someone will call you to arrange an appointment” (rather than them actually arranging the appointment there and then; they can’t, apparently as it’s a different department), we finally got a call, and a time and date for one their technicians to come with our router. We thought, “Yay, we’re on the home straight.” We naively hoped this might mean line activation. We also, naively, hoped they might actually turn up on the appointed day. I can cope with an hour or two late, as long as they actually just arrive.

Fran had even arranged to work from home, so she was available to discuss the situation with the tecnico, as my Italian is too rubbish in the inevitable event of complicated explanations (like a plumber explaining to me why our bathroom radiator doesn’t work, but that’s another, tedious, story).

Now, sure it’s unprofessional and just plain rude for the tecnico to neither turn up or contact us to tell us why s/he couldn’t turn up, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. There had, for starters, been an enormous storm the night before, as Rome has a tendency to grind to a semi-halt after a bit of heavy rain.

And, to be fair to Italy, getting broadband, or indeed, any telecoms sorted in Britain isn’t ever straightforward either. Indeed, British telecommunications companies are notoriously bad at basic communications. BT can, for example spam you with gratuitous promotional junk mail, but try calling them, and you’d be lucky to get away with 15 minutes of expensive hold followed by a garbled conversation to someone in a call centre in India. But at least you could, in principle, call them.

Yesterday, as the late arrival looked more and more like a no-show, Fran tried to call Fastweb. Or as we call them, Slowweb, or Noweb. Ho ho. Grrr.

The problem was that the 192 192, or 193 193 or whatever number she’d been given didn’t work from her mobile with an Italian SIM, her mobile with a UK SIM, or my mobile with a UK SIM. So she called another number. And they gave her another, normal, number. Which didn’t work. So she called another number. And got another number. Which, even did give her some automated menu options but not the option she actually needed. Now, in such cases, you’d think that holding would give you a human, eventually. But oh no.

So basically we had another telecoms company where we couldn’t actually communicate with the department we needed to reach, and where the people we could reach couldn’t even connect us.

Maybe we could call them if we had a land line. But we need them to activate our land line first. My head hurts.

4 Comments

Filed under Rome

Tagged as , , ,

November 15, 2011 · 7:42 am

Dislike a Virgin

Real internet continues to elude us in the capital city of Italy, so we’re surviving on a diet of dongles – including one whose software insisted on BSOD’ing my computer – and the tantalising whiff our neighbours’ WiFi networks.

All of which makes access to decent radio – ie 6Music and Radio 4, with perhaps a little Radio 2 – impossible. We can’t even get World Service here on a conventional radio.

The station that we’ve tuned to on our little non-digital number in the kitchen is Virgin. Let me just make it clear that this is the least bad station we can find. Which means it’s the station that plays the smallest amount of stupefyingly bad Italian pop/rock. It does play some though, and that’s mostly in the form of sub- and cod-Bryan Adams soft rock. Yes, apparently all Italian “rock” singers have to be gravelly voiced. I assume it’s in the constitution.

Those tracks, perhaps surprisingly, aren’t the worst Virgin has to offer though. The station also has a deeply irritating range of “spoken jingles” (I don’t know the technical term), performed by a gormless-sounding woman with a south of England accent. She intones things like “Style rock”, “Contemporary rock”, “Rock forever”. Even sometimes treating us to rolled Rs in “rock”. Oddly. Oh and yes, there’s a lot of English used, which is understandable when much of their fare is in English.

Another “jingle” samples someone saying “Let’s crank this motherfucker up.” Something that’s not ideal when my three-year-old nephew is around.

Now firstly I’d like to point out that while vintage panto heavy metal like AC/DC may qualify as “rock”, the oft-played Coldplay does not, by any stretch of the imagination. And why Coldplay may qualify as “contemporary”, I’m not sure that argument stretches to the adolescent poetry of The Doors (hey, I still like the music, but oh boy, those lyrics don’t scan so well as you age way beyond Morrison’s age).

More worryingly though, the station seems happy to excavate a disgusting seam of misogyny exemplified by a couple of songs currently in their (limited) playlist. One culprit is by far and away also the worst song they’re playing: “We’re all gonna die” by Slash. And Iggy Pop. I’m having to restrain myself from using lots of exclamation marks here. Iggy Pop!! I’m ashamed to say I maligned the entire Italian nation when I initially thought this had to be an Italian song. It’s jaw-droppingly moronic, tuneless, and lyrically odious. Did Iggy really co-write that? Is he singing? Is he doing it for a joke?

The other current culprit – and I’m having to Google this to find out who it is – is “The bitch came back” by Canadian bank Theory of a Deadman. Who I’d never heard of before this moment. This band may have done some other good songs; I don’t dislike their audio style per se, but the lyrics of this song are way out of order, or at least are way out of order for being played outside the confines of a some dumb male teenager’s bedroom. Sure, maybe it’s a comedy record, but it’s just plain nasty. Mr Branson, I think you need some higher ethical standards in this regard.

Anyway, you wonder why we turn the radio on at all. Well, because I like to have music while I cook, and because it’s not all bad. They do play plenty of music that I can tolerate, and sometimes even music I actually like. In no particular order these include: Depeche Mode, The Beatles, Smashing Pumpkins, Queen, Led Zep, Foo Fighters, Neil Young, Kasabian, Pink Floyd, Noel Gallagher, Travis, Jane’s Addiction, Vaccines etc.

Oh, and you too can enjoy those gormless verbal jingles here.

1 Comment

Filed under Main thread, Rome

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

November 11, 2011 · 4:03 am

The discomfort of strangers

On three separate occasions yesterday, random Italians talked to me in the street. Yikes!

Firstly, I’m baffled by this as I doubt I pass for Italian. I may be slightly more moro (dark, of skin and hair) than the average Caucasian Brit, but surely my style and manner is foreign. When we were talking about national stereotypes in a class, the things that came up for English and British* were: sciatti e sporchi (scruffy and dirty) and i denti brutti (you know, like Austin Powers)!

Secondly, though, these situations always catch me by surprise. Walking around I’m often mulling things over in Italian in my head, playing out conversational scenarios or whatever. Which, counter intuitively, means I really struggle when someone actually talks to me in real Italian. In the real world.

On the first occasion, I was going down some ridiculous steps near where we live (the top part is all made from slightly wobbly scaffolding, and would seem to be temporary were it not for the fact that it’s so weathered and there’s such a massive build-up of trash below. The bottom part is a huge, grand bit of 19th century construction. Go figure.). I was asked directions, and managed to fumble a reply in semi-Italian. Afterwards I was annoyed with myself for not getting my agreements right – I said l’altro scale, when it probably, maybe should have been le altre scale (the other steps). Ooops.

On the second occasion, I was taking a picture of this poster. (Note the apposite advert below.)

I believe it’s saying the junta of Renata Polverini (pres of Lazio) are using Villa Adriana, aka Hadrian’s Villa, in Tivoli, as a dump, or planning to. But don’t quote me on that. I tried to ask my teacher to explain, but I couldn’t quite follow her reply. This is the story I think, if you can actually read Italian. Anyway, some smart-looking chap started ranting and doing the classic hand gesture as he walked past me. I couldn’t tell if he was saying it was bullshit or it was a disgrace. Gah.

On the third occasion, I was musing while I walked through the artisan backstreets near Campo di Fiori and another chap said something to me. Given the context, he was either asking the time, asking for a light, or propositioning me. Annoyingly, in this case, I knew the words, almost, but just misheard. It sounded like avere scendere – “to have” “to descend”. Of course he was saying avere accendere or some variation thereof, with accendere being the verb “to light”. Which I only really grasped last thing at night when I quizzed Fran. D’oh!

Still, one and a quarter-ish out of three ain’t so bad.

 

* Many Italians appear to use the two interchangeably, which annoys me no end, and is certainly deeply offensive to the Welsh and Scots, but that’s another story.

5 Comments

Filed under Main thread, Rome

Tagged as , , , , , ,

November 4, 2011 · 4:12 am

Non capisco

We’ve been in Italy for just over two months now. I’ve been studying Italian for about eight weeks, for about three hours each weekday. And I’m still utterly, utterly rubbish. In fact, I feel like I’m going backwards. Every encounter with an Italian speaker follows the same pattern – I manage to ask a question, just about, then they reply at a natural pace and I’m lost. Frustration and embarrassment ensue, to greater or lesser degrees depending on how low my generally meagre confidence is that day.

I’ve changed classes a few times already as teachers have left or been shuffled around. My first teacher was great, and made me feel very comfortable blundering through my first attempts at Italian. My second teacher was a blustering arse, who was uninterested in males and seemed to prefer a mode that involved a weird blend of bullying and brutish flirtation with the females. I changed classes. My third teacher was also good. But things were getting harder, and increasingly I’ve struggled to follow the flow. I always imagined language learning would be a gradual process of improvement, but currently I very much feel like I’m going backwards.

This week I’ve been with a fourth teacher – apparently an academic who’s written theses in Latin – who is also nice, but the class has been an enormous struggle. This is partly because it’s full of cocky, confident twenty-ish continental blokes, who all seem to already speak two or more languages (one guy rattled off a list of about five). In such circumstances, I’m utterly ashamed. Ashamed to be an inept monolinguist, grandson to a guy who spoke seven languages. And ashamed to be British. We really are crap with languages, especially now. The British empire of the 19th century, then the US empire of the 20th century may have made English a key international language, but while our empire is gone, the US empire is also on the decline, notably with the rise of China as the pre-eminent global power and trading nexus.

It’s a period when we really should be emphasising languages more at school, but instead they seem to be in decline. According to this article, the past decade and a half has seen GCSE and A-level French and German almost halving in the UK. Which may not really be a problem in an era when Mandarin and Spanish are surely becoming the most important global languages. But it also says uptake of “Chinese” has dropped, by, what, about 6%. It’s a real shame.

What’s also a shame is the very structure of language education in Britain, or at least my experience of it. I learned French at secondary school, for five years, between the ages of 11 and 16 ish (hey, it was a long time ago). You’d think after five years I’d be pretty fluent, but no, the teaching techniques were old-fashioned and of dubious efficacy, and we didn’t even have an exchange. Although my Italian is rubbish, oddly I am starting to feel it’s not a million miles away from my French, which does really highlight the failings of those five years.

The age range for those lessons was also utter nonsense. The human brain absorbs language readily pre-puberty, so if you’re going to teach languages, start at primary school, if not before, otherwise it’s verging on pointless. Unless after your GCSE or whatever you move to another country and get a local boy/girlfriend, for example – the other failsafe method of learning a language.

I fantasise about reaching that point where, after I’ve said something, I’ll actually be able to understand the reply. That point where you just understand conversation and ambient chat. That point where you even dream in another language. All things I have no concept of, and am starting to wonder if I ever will.

Being not of an outgoing disposition, middle-aged and married to a Brit (albeit one who bucks the shame by speaking very good French and pretty good Italian; the former consolidated by the aforementioned BF technique), I’m in a disappointing situation where I’m not really making Italian friends, whose companionship would be invaluable for learning the lingua. It’s said that the Italian social life revolves around family, so that excludes us sad childless types; and being an old fart, I’m not really out boozing with the ragazzi as that’d just be creepy. Perhaps worst of all though, I don’t like caffè and I’m not interested in calcio. The twin columns of Italian culture. Oh dear.

5 Comments

Filed under Main thread, Rome

Tagged as , , , ,

October 20, 2011 · 6:00 am

Il tempo brutto

After having a bit of a rant about politics and economics yesterday, I thought it’d be good to get back on safer ground today, with that perennially popular topic for us Brits: the weather. And, specifically, horrendous weather – il tempo brutto.

Before arriving in Rome, we’d heard that the city occasionally experiences massive storms, but it’s been hard to conceive of even so much as a heavy rain shower here as most of the past 6 weeks have been clear and sunny, and only slowly dropping from utterly scorchio through much of September to temperate now, with many days featuring my favourite kind of weather – cool, verging on the crisp, in the morning, warm, verging on hot later on. (Weather that always reminds me of my favourite part of the world – Golden Bay and environs in New Zealand’s South Island.)

Anyway, today was different. We woke to the sound of the rain rattling on our exterior metal shutters, and frequent claps of thunder (tuono). It was just past dawn, but the sky was still dark as night, lit only by flashes of lightning (lampo or fulmine). My wife was freaked by the prospect of getting to work, but not because of a soaking during the 10-minute walk to the station, but because of the lampi, being one of those types who believe she is destined to be struck, every time there’s a storm.

Me, I was more worried about the soaking, and with good cause. Despite a raincoat, a brolly and Gore-Tex-lined shoes, my 25 minute walk to language class left me decidedly soggy. It was pretty exciting though. We live up on a hill, Monteverde, and there are a lot of stairways. Usually benign, sun-dappled steps transformed into raging cataracts were an impressive sight.

As Rome is generally dry, presumably it’s not a priority to keep the drains clear. They’re all doubtless rammed with spazzatura (rubbish), mozzicone di sigarette, merda di cane, polvere (dust; one of those great words with a built-in mnemonic – ie pulverised), e cose. Oh, and lots of leaves, as it’s autumn. Ergo, my normal walk involved dodging torrents and wading through various temporary lakes. A Gore-Tex shoe lining ain’t much good when the water comes over the top.

The Tiber, meanwhile, was threatening to flood the cycle track and path alongside it when I went over Ponte Sisto at 8.40am ish. When I came back after midday, lo and behold the tracks had disappeared in the brown swirling murk. It’s no surprise that after Rome became the capital of the new republic in 1870, the powers that be were keen to sort it out this soggy beast, then without embankments, properly. Apparently it used to flood so badly, via del Corso – the equivalent of say London’s Oxford Street – hosted a sailing race in 1878*.

The flood waters in the streets have subsided fairly quickly, but it’s interesting to experience this kind of weather. It rains a lot in Britain, certainly, but historically – at least in my lifetime – it was always more a case of lots of middlingly-heavy rain, endless days of grey and drizzle. So us Brits are arguably less used to this kind of tempesta. That said, the past few years in England we’ve been increasingly experiencing massive, tropical-style storms, where unusually large levels of rain fall in a short period (Thank you climate change.) So you’d think I’d have worked out the best way to handle such weather. Nope. I didn’t even bring my Wellies to Rome. They would have been perfect this morning.

* See Whispering City: Rome and its Histories, RJB Bosworth (Yale University Press, 2011), p114.

Leave a comment

Filed under Rome

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 19, 2011 · 6:01 am

“Merry Crisis”

Found myself in an interesting position the other day (ok, Saturday 15 October 2011), as I went from tour guide to demonstrator by way of the liminal act of slipping through a police cordon.

Some friends were visiting from England, and I plotted out a circular walk to show them Rome, including some of the tourist faves. The only thing they adamantly wanted to see was the Colosseum. I was keen to revisit the old brute too, having recently re-watched Gladiator, for a digital taste of ancient Rome in its prime. So after a grand giro that took in the Janiculum, St Peters, some quality pizza in a slightly ratty place in the Prati, Piazza del Popolo, Villa Borghese, Spanish Steps and the Trevi (is it ever not utter carnage there?), we headed for the Colosseum.

I was unaware of the global day of demonstrations. In my defence, we’ve not got real internet, my Italian is still too poor to read an Italian daily, and I generally only read the Guardian Weekly, a superb digest of quality news stories but not exact current. I took a backstreet route, keen to avoid the traffic on via dei Fori Imperiali, and suddenly found myself faced with a crowd and a line of cops, young guys looking all bad-ass with their belts and guns and sunglasses and hair product. Still oblivious, we waited our turn to squeeze through a between van and ancient ruins, and found the via dei Fori Imperiali not full of stinky vehicles, but instead full of people – demonstrators.

Italy, like the US but less like the UK, is a place of vocal political extremes. I’m sure there is centrism, but it doesn’t make its presence felt very clearly. This march seemed full of red flags with that strikingly anachronistic symbol, the hammer and sickle, amongst others.

The protest, like those in 81 other cities around the world (I found out later) was vocalising despair at the economic collapse, which some are now suggesting is worse than the 1930s Great Depression. I may be getting on a bit, but I’ve no memories of that particular crisis. Instead, I’m living through this one – and all too painfully aware that we, the ordinary people, are dealing with the fallout of things going wrong in that odious alliance between the finance industry and the super-haves. Pretty much everyone else is a have-not, but it’s the super-haves that run the place, via corporate power and the giant casino that seems to form the heart of the global economy.

That absurd casino is particular tangible in countries like Iceland – oops – and the UK, where we’ve abdicated and abnegated most of our other, real industry. Well, guess what, gambling is no replacement for heavy industry or manufacturing or viable agriculture – you know, processes that actually produce useful, tangible stuff. that, you know, could provide products to a local market. I think that’s what the widespread and somewhat amorphous protests are actually about – it’s not about right or left, political concepts that feel outmoded and profoundly unhelpful in the face of the economic and environmental crises of our era. It’s about, frankly, getting real. About controlling the gamblers and instead regenerating industry, particularly at a local level. Unfortunately, humanity largely tends to follow a pattern of the rich ruling for the rich (read rich old white men; cf this article), and the rest be damned. More idealistic notions such as Marxism led to the monstrosity of Stalinism and the epic failed experiment that was the USSR. What replaced that? More overt kleptocratic gangsterism, much like that in the US, or here in Italy, or even in the UK, where it’s obfuscated slightly by the arrogantly polite veneer of decency projected by our ruling class of old Etonians who have no concept that there’s a real world beyond the superannuated Oxbridge debating society atmosphere of Westminster.

Anyway, so although I feel many of the same complaints as many of these demonstrators, we weren’t quite prepared to fully participate, particularly not when the truck with the giant sound-system rolled down the road, pounding bassy hip-hop and followed by a horde of the kind of punching-the-air, black-clad, hooded youths that have accompanied so many newspaper headlines recently. We retreated, found the entire road blocked by police and carabinieri vehicles, and not a single official steward type to advise the many bewildered-looking tourists. Squeezing back through our entry point, a black column of smoke filled the sky above the Colosseum, and the water-cannon trucks screamed past us. It was certainly a very different vision of crowds at the Colosseum to those watching Maximus scrap, and justifiably slaw, nasty emperor Commodus. A means of changing society that’s nice and immediate, but not really a viable option.

(Oh, and Rome is already the most graffitied city I’ve visited, but the new slogans sprouted like fungus on this particular weekend. My favourite? “Merry Crisis”.

“Oh, #2”, it’s interesting to see the mask worn the terrorist/freedom fighter, hero/antihero of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s ‘V For Vendetta’ [and its middling film adaptation] appearing at these events. That’s a tangled semiotic web if ever there was one.

“Oh #3” – I snapped the three posters today; I like that socialist realist aesthetic, and fair enough to encourage people to “buy Italian”. See the above link to the Guardian Blog for a comment on that state of affairs.)

Leave a comment

Filed under Rome

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 12, 2011 · 8:13 am

Dem bones

Exploring Rome, I’ve visited various marvellous churches, from the absurdly ornate Chiese Nuove, to the fascinating San Clemente, with its three tiers of history. The most unusual church visit so far was, however, to Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini.

This church – one of innumerable Santa Marias in the city –  dates from the 1620s, and was built on the orders of Pope Urban VIII. Mr Urban’s bro was a member of the Capuchin order (you know, the people who invented the cappuccino. Not really. It’s named after their garb). This brother, Antonio Marcello Barberini – a member of one of Italy’s major aristocratic families – had the perfectly sane notion to exhume the bones of thousands of dead Capuchins and arrange their bones in the church’s crypt.

I know the memento mori – “remember your mortality” – is historically a perennial piece of artistic iconography, but this really does seem extreme. Apparently, they order simply got into the habit (ahem) of putting their own dead there, along with the bones of various other Romans – including children. Fresh corpses were buried without a coffin for 30 years, then exhumed to be used in the decorations. The soil itself was – get this – imported from Jerusalem. This grand art project religious undertaking only ceased in the late 19th century.

The whole thing is deeply, deeply macabre, and totally at odds with the kind of largely wholesome New Testement Christianity I grew up with. Indeed, even I, an avid consumer of humanity’s more grim cultural output in the form of horror films and whatnot, felt somewhat queasy in the presence of all those bones artfully arranged into patterns and, in the final chapel, a diminutive, bony Grim Reaper, who hangs above you.

The lanterns of bones, mere millimetres above my head as I walked down the corridor, brought to mind Ed Gein’s human skin lampshades, while the skeletons of monks dressed in their habits resembled the antagonists of Amando de Ossorio’s “Blind Dead” cult series of zombie films.

The cheery message is “Quello che voi siete, noi eravamo; quello che noi siamo, voi sarete.” (“What you are now, we used to be; what we are now, you will be.”). Which is fair enough. But seriously, it’s the weirdest expression of Catholicism I’ve ever seen, topping even the demi-Mayan hybrid activities of San Juan Chamula in Mexico.

My wife Fran said the presence of so many bones reminded her of the bone-filled memorial stupa of the Choeung-Ek Killing Field in Cambodia. Most of us, in the course of a modern, Western lifetime, simply don’t come this close to so many human remains. I can understand the function and power of Choeung-Ek, but I’m baffled by the practises of Santa Maria della Concezione. At least catacomb ossuaries, generally, just stack up the bones, and don’t play with them so ardently. As momento mori go, it’s raw, over-to-top and frankly somewhat pagan.

1 Comment

Filed under Main thread, Rome

Tagged as , ,

October 5, 2011 · 6:02 am

“Death on the highway”

72,000 people were killed on Italy’s roads during the 1990s. 72,000. More than were killed in the Vietnam war, according to Tobias Jones.

Yes, I’ve finally got round to reading The Dark Heart of Italy. It was recommended to me after it was first published in 2003, but without any tangible connection with Italy, I didn’t bother. Now I’m living here, it makes sense to read it. And a thoroughly engaging read it is too, though the user-critics on Amazon make some interesting , albeit arguably misguided, points about its credentials. Jones lived in Italy for four years, with an Italian girlfriend, and presumably wrote the book as he went along, as he learned Italian. The Amazon critics abuse him for getting things wrong. But it’s not written as the ultimate fact-based portrait of Italy (c2001-2002), but more like a series of observational opinion pieces, many published previously as magazine stories. Indeed, they’re not unlike blog entries, in many ways.

Writing a blog, or doing any kind of online publishing, there’s a strong sense that you should really be re-visiting each piece, and revising it as you learn more, as your ignorance or understanding shifts (something that’s harder to do with print media).

So for example, when I wrote this about Rome’s traffic, it was early September and I’d only been living in the city for a few weeks. I was naive and ignorant (I still am of course). In early September, a lot of Rome’s residents were still on holiday, avoiding the summer heat. When they came back, the number of SUV-type vehicles on the roads increased markedly. So that’s one comment from that earlier blog piece that’s inaccurate.

(As an aside – seriously, what the hell are these people thinking? Fossil fuels are a tangible and ongoing environmental catastrophe, oil itself is getting increasingly pricey, AND Rome is a city with a core of old neighbourhoods with tiny streets. Status symbolism really is so much more important than common sense to our moronic species.)

Another comment from that earlier blog that’s inaccurate is about cycling in Rome. I do see a certain amount of cyclists in Rome now. I even see people using the cycle track along the Tiber. Presumably, again, people who’ve come back from their holidays. I even sometimes see people wearing helmets, though not often. Though the cycling population is still tiny compared to that of London. In London, a dedicated riverside cycle track would be chocka.

Anyway, the point is that essays, blog entries, or even books like The Dark Heart of Italy aren’t about facts, they’re about opinions, and a certain amount of ignorance goes along with that.  Opinions are an essential part of writing, they’re dynamic, lively. There’s a clear difference between a news story and an opinion piece, but unfortunately in an era of immediate, easy reactions to anything that’s published, many people forget or ignore the distinction and are all too ready to troll.

That said, I wish Jones’ book that included a note giving the source for the “72,000” killed figure.

So anyway, I’m going to publish this now. In a week I might disagree with myself, but I doubt I’ll re-write this completely at any point.

(Oh, and quick quiz – name that tune.)

 

 

 

2 Comments

Filed under Rome

Tagged as , , , , , ,

September 28, 2011 · 5:51 am

Blasé

Been noticing the last few days how my road-crossing technique is changing. When I first arrived in Rome, like many stranieri (foreigners – forgive the random Italian words, it helps me learn them), I perched on the pavement, terrified. Now however I’m learning the technique. Some people say you should catch the driver’s eye, but this is nonsense – it’s a sunny country, so the windscreen will be reflecting, and you’ll likely be wearing shades. So instead, just gaze intently at the driver’s location – itself a slightly tricky proposition when in your home country drivers sit on the other side of the vehicle. Make your presence felt, stride out meaningfully.

I’m becoming so used to this technique that I worry when I return to the UK, I’ll absent-mindedly try it with British drivers and get splatted.

On a more serious note – people do of course get killed by traffic frequently, even with the seemingly casual way pedestrials face up to the insane traffic in Rome. Some people even do their bit to encourage more sensible driving. I walk past this graffito most days:

(Avert your eyes if you don’t like sweary swearwords, as it essentially says “Be aware of pedestrians / Dickheads / Slow the fuck down”. Just down the road is a banner that says “Caio Cesare” – I doubt it’s saying bye to a friend who was moving overseas.)

Anyway, the point is that, although my personality will never in a million years become even remotely Roman, I am adapting to the environment. I could say I’m becoming more blasé, but the use of a French word seems inappropriate. I can’t, however, use the equivalent Italian word as there doesn’t seem to be one. Our massive dictionary suggests indifferente or scettico, but they would seem to mean indifferent and sceptical. There’s sangue freddo – which our little dictionary translate as coolness – but that’s not quite right either. The seemingly casual approach to various – but absolutely not all – elements of life is so much a part of the Roman character that maybe there’s just no need for a word. (By the way, I hesitate to say “Italian character”, as a) I’m only intimately experiencing Rome at the moment and b) Italy is a notoriously varied place, of very strong regional identities.)

While walking home from language classes today, I passed through the Campo de’ Fiori, home to the bustling market and the marvellous, belligerently placed statue of Giordano Bruno. At the south end the market, various touts were selling tat – fake designer bags and sunglasses. Suddenly, they all started scattering, grabbing their ware and running towards the river, as various sturdy looking plain clothes polizi arrived. Presumably the touts didn’t have licenses of whatever. The point is, I was right in the middle of this debacle, and it didn’t even occur to me to be all English, step out of the way, stop, stare and say “heavens above!” I just kept on strolling.

The final minor incident of this type occurred as I continued to andare a piedi, through Trastevere. Up one of the many impossibly cute, if grubby and graffitied, cobbled streets, I spotted a group of four men up ahead, one intently moving a table around in the street (more of an alley, or vicolo perhaps). I strolled through this strange group too, only noticing as I passed the ridiculous cheekbones of the best-dressed of the group, the camera wielded by another and the huge pile of stuff marked “Giorgio Amani”. Some kind of fashion shoot thing. Whatever. And on I went.

 

3 Comments

Filed under Rome

Tagged as , ,